FATS & OILS

There is some pretty disturbing information on the internet about the use of human fat in soap...

I can't even get used to washing myself with goats milk soap - a natural product, yet here we are being offered human fat soap. To be honest I'd rather eat goats milk products (cheese!) rather than wash myself with it so I can't imagine using soap made from a fellow human being.

It goes back as far as 1780 , the former Holy Innocents' Cemetery in Paris was closed because of overuse. In 1786, the bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of fat. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.

That wasn't what I expected to read. It gets worse though, just announced is this article:

In March 2019 at the Adelaide Festival in Australia, Dutch Artist Julian Hetzel is going to be selling bars of soap. But no ordinary foamy shower tools, these ones are made by extracting human fat through liposuction, which is then turned into soap. You read that right.

Details can be found right here and no, I'm not going to create soap with anything other than plant based oils and butters. I truly do believe it's more shock value than anything else. Would you really want to wash yourself with someone else's body fat? I'm all for reusing/reducing/recycling, but not like that. There is a limit on what you coat yourself with in the shower. It needs to cleanse and nourish your skin, not stress it. Your skin is your largest organ, it needs love and care with nutrition. Much like your insides, when you feed your gut with healing nutrient dense foods, the same should be for your skin - feeding it with the good oils and butters that nourish it. Perhaps if it was your own fat it might be a different story?

However your feelings are placed on what is and isn't acceptable, there is a soap out there to fit what resonates with you. For me, I'm curious about the history of soap and it's ingredients and how far we've come. To know that it may (or may not) be true that in both World Wars human fat may have been used is unnerving.

Always quiz your soapmaker on the ingredients they use. If they are using human fat, run a mile!